Dear community,

This proposal, submitted with the authorization of the curators of Bounty 31, seeks funding to continue Public RPC Provider services for one year.

The requested funding covers both the previous tender period and the upcoming one. Three months of the total are retroactive funding for Tender 4, while the remainder supports Tender 5. Tender 4’s funding was reduced by 25% following negotiations with Parity Technologies.

The Public RPC bounty funds RPC infrastructure through a blind tender process similar to traditional procurement. Curators define the required service scope using usage data from a monitoring system. This scope sets out the quality requirements, expected request volumes, and required number of providers for each supported chain.

Participants first submit a hash of their proposal by the deadline, then later reveal the full proposal document. Curators verify that the submitted proposal matches the original hash before scoring the tender.

This process has delivered significant benefits by keeping pricing close to market value while allowing RPC capacity to scale according to current ecosystem demand. Each tender round is based on fresh usage data and updated service requirements.

The bounty has also been guided to provide an alternative entry point for RPC service through a GeoDNS/load-balancer system. This system would connect users to the geographically nearest suitable provider and perform health checks to redirect traffic if a provider goes offline, becomes unhealthy, or reaches saturation. This would improve reliability, performance, and resilience for users accessing public RPC infrastructure.

Importantly, the existing direct entry point for each individual provider would remain published. Users and applications would therefore remain free to connect directly to a preferred provider, or to avoid the GeoDNS/load-balanced service entirely, depending on their own preference and requirements.

This proposal requests $164,455.23 for 12 months of RPC service provision for the Polkadot Relay Chain and all Polkadot System Chains.

A link to the proposal can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wgVHy98MNowCkgRIBjWr7TdX0T1sHbJwiKPlkCq6RJo/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.opw8llbn4ibw

Many thanks and we look forward to your support,
Daniel from Simply Staking